Sellers of Shopify are more like sellers on Amazon than they know. Shopify controls what you can sell, what apps you can use, so is it really software for your business or you’re just a cog in its machine to become the next Amazon. I’ve seen so many DTC brands switch to Medusa and Woocommerce with a custom storefront.
In what ways? I'm sure there are businesses they refuse to support (like any company) but I have a family member running a Shopify store (selling things that you couldn't over Amazon due to logistics) and Shopify
- Doesn't have any pre approval process for products. We can add and edit products instantaneously with no process involving anyone else.
- Has never appeared to care, even when "products" are things like "we agreed on a delivery method over the phone".
I'd also point out that the store owns the brand with Shopify. We could switch out the backend for a different ones and the users wouldn't really notice. You couldn't do the same with Amazon.
Try selling used Apple products which you can on any website or marketplace online, except Apple will contact Shopify and they will unpublish products without even telling you.
You used to be able to install custom Shopify apps on your own store, now they make you jump through hoops. Their ideal situation is an Apple like walled garden where you can only install apps from their store. Had a friend trying to vibecode a custom Shopify app so he could replace one from the App Store that was running him $250/m. It was so confusing that he just gave up. I’m trying to get him to switch to an open-source alternative.
Try selling Vape products or adult products and you’ll see you don’t really control the software. Selling used Apple products, vapes, and adult products is completely legal. Yes Stripe and PayPal can stop you from accepting payments for those products. But why is my business software doing the same?
Shopify not being willing to fight battles to keep supporting stores that other people don't want them to isn't exactly the same as them choosing what you can sell... Though I guess I see some similarity.
> I’m trying to get him to switch to an open-source alternative.
Well if you want an argument in favor between terrible support, glitchy software, huge price hikes, and so on we aren't particularly happy with Shopify either...
> Shopify not being willing to fight battles to keep supporting stores that other people don't want them to isn't exactly the same as them choosing what you can sell...
Even if you have your own stack for software, you still need someone for payments, and that's where it hits you.
Shopify was letting Kanye sells nazi merch, they don't give a crap for most things unless it's trademark issues.
Opensource is the only way to free sellers from propeitary SaaS and marketplace middlemen. I’m actually working on building an opensource Shopify for every vertical from restaurants to gyms to hotels.
There’s an adapter system and we have Stripe and PayPal adapters but some users have created one for Solana Pay and Coinbase. Essentially it’s up to the seller what payments they want to support. Create the adapter functions once and you’re good.
Indeed it's worse, and apparently Valve/Steam is the only one who seems to care about something resembling freedom to sell legal things, even if we might subjectively disagree.
Shopify runs a payment network called Shop Pay, and that network has relationships with the credit card companies like Visa. Honestly how do you expect to transact in goods that almost nobody will do business in? Even if you have the listing, what supported Shopify payment system will do the business?
Yes I know about Shop Pay (it’s a wrapper around Stripe). And just like Stripe and PayPal, Shop Pay gives Shopify the right to stop users from selling certain products.
I’m talking about connecting Shopify to authorize.net (credit card gateway) and a custom high risk processor. In that case, we are not using Shop Pay. But Shopify can still unpublish and restrict what you sell. That’s the issue. No one is saying Shopify has to allow sellers to sell high risk items under Shop Pay. It’s when you connect to a different payment processor.
As long as you get a high risk payment processor, you can sell these products in the US. But even when you connect this high risk processor to Shopify, they can still stop you from selling certain products. Payment processors are supposed to handle that and if my payment processor is ok with it, who made Shopify the judge, jury, executioner? Why is a software that manages my product catalog and orders deciding what I can sell? If I'm selling something illegal, my payment processor will handle it or the wronged company can sue me. Shopify shouldn't be deciding this.
I mean take a look at how peptides are exploding. It's legal to sell them for research purposes, but you can't on Shopify. Unless you are on Plus and have an account manager and go thru backchannels. Literally Shopify picking winners instead of letting the market do it's job.
That is the assumption Shopify is just software, but it is not. It is a service. And I don't see why a service can't have a choice to choose which customer it wants to serve. Especially in a market with plenty of options.
Sorry but as someone who has a Shopify store and also sells via Amazon - you are dead wrong.
I have much more freedom with Shopify, it's not even comparable. It's not even apples to oranges, it's apples to calculators.
Amazon places a lot more restrictions on everything, from products, product descriptions, images, it's quite difficult to list original products on Amazon (took me 2 weeks of work to register our product backlog when I started selling via Amazon, despite having GTINs and everything already in place). Cashflow etc is not comparable in ANY way.
Just wanted to call out a blatantly wrong comment.
Yep, as a former shopify seller, this read like someone who had no clue and no basis in reality.
And yes i have a lot of criticisms of shopify, but for the most part on the product side you can do whatever you want if the payment platforms accept it, this is very different than amazon.
Depends on what you sell. We were in electronic recycling selling everything from Xeon processors and server ram to used iPhones and MacBooks on Amazon. Easy to sell and list, no issues.
Then we realized we weren’t really building a brand on Amazon so we started a Shopify store. Listed the same products and one day just unpublished. Messaged Shopify and they said we can’t sell used Apple products. Send them our Amazon and eBay stores with thousands of sales. Didn’t care. I brought in a payment processor myself, still unpublished. I just built my own Shopify alternative at that point.
In the end, you’re selling products that Shopify deems ok so you’re not going to face these issues. Do you really think Shopify doesn’t have issues just cause you don’t face them?
I am admittedly not an expert here but this does not at all sound like something that Apple can force Shopify to do. I was under the impression that when Apple does something like this it's primarily because the seller was positioning themselves as an official Apple reseller in some way which they do pretty aggressively police. Did Shopify give you any more details on why they believed they had to delist you?
Because we were in electronic recycling, many items came without batteries or chargers due to fire-risk concerns, so we had to source replacements ourselves. We eventually launched a private-label brand for generic camera batteries, drone batteries, power-tool batteries, chargers, and similar accessories.
Then Shopify unpublished those products too after Canon contacted them, claiming we were not allowed to sell them. But these were generic replacement products, the same kind of items sold by Anker and countless other electronics brands online.
If Canon believed we were doing something illegal, they could have sent a cease-and-desist and gone through the normal legal process. Instead, they went through Shopify’s back channels and effectively skirted due process, using platform pressure to remove products they simply did not want us selling.
But don’t worry, companies like Anker who have resources and pull can still sell them and have online websites. Again, the market is being manipulated and winners chosen.
Or were you doing something shady that was legitimate grounds for Shopify to remove those products? There's a big difference between what you personally think should be appropriate and what laws and compliance requirements consider. It's like the annual HN post about someone that claims Cloudflare shut down their account and eventually it turns out they were clearly doing something against the TOS.
It's been a fun day for me today - my bank here in the UK suffered downtime which not only affected the app and online banking, but also online and possibly offline payments too.
I was glad when it finally came back on, after four hours off, so that I could order some material for a job... only to find that my supplier's site wasn't working. It's on shopify.
So too the two the other suppliers I use who offer the same thing I need, so I'm kinda stuffed as ordering from anytime now means I likely won't get my stuff in before the weekend, which is when I was planning on working with it.
eh, unfortunately it's not today's work that's impacted (beyond wasting some time), but this weekend's, which I thought I had wonderfully set up, taking advantage of time whilst my family's away.
I have a friend at shopify in a staff role and they are so incredibly into AI it's fascinating. Even their job interviews are all about using AI and the traditional algorithm questions are gone. PRs written by AI, and PRs reviewed by AI and rubber stamped by humans.
I can't speak to stability but I get the impression it's a poster child for being all in on AI, moreso than other tech companies. By far.
Tobi Lutke is known to be an eccentric. I listened to an interview a few years ago. Clearly smart and forward thinking. He's also polarizing. He's very into optimize everything, systems thinking. Hard to say it's wrong but definitely comes off a bit cold.
I don't like how Shopify deletes events from https://www.shopifystatus.com/ shortly after they are resolved. Outages have to be inferred by waking up to a bunch of alerts and hoping someone else posted about it on the internet.
X has always been a better source of outages than any official status site. It's either early, before there's anything official posted, or it's something the vendor doesn't consider worthy of an outage because it only affects a particular subset of customers.
Shopify was hiring in January, not sure what it's like now. I'd also love working on RoR projects, and have seriously enjoyed developing on Shopify.
I hated their CLI tool for app dev because I like tinkering myself, but I would've probably built the same thing in bash, so having a maintained CLI is nice.
Too bad I'm a medior, so there's a low chance they'd hire me ;P
There's also much more to Shopify than just Ruby feature work. I've heard tales of their infrastructure and it seems like it would be very exciting for the right kind of person.
Never worked there, probably never will, but they have my respect for the things I have seen, read and heard.
Rails was very relevant when I was at Shopify. There were some backend infra services in Go/Rust, Front end was largely React, and Data Science was Python. But all of the main website back ends were totally Ruby on Rails.
This tweet should be a case study in anthropomorphizing AI. It has a name, a gender, a backstory. If you overheard this guy talking about his pet AI and missed the context that it's a machine, you'd think he was talking about a real human person. Very strange.
"Employees must explain why AI can’t be used before asking for additional resources, like more staff or time. [...] Shopify is now factoring AI usage into performance reviews and peer evaluations."
Read his takes on twitter, he's far from level headed and down to earth, he has definitely drank the right-wing billionaires kool aid and turned full on MAGA in January 2025.
No. As a Shopify User and app maintainer, I’ve started seeing more bugs and although Shopify is still much more reliable than Github, it’s the second time in 6 months I see it going down, something that would never happen 5 years ago.
Last month I found a critical bug in the forum where you could edit anyone’s post title.
You will never know. Lots of pretty important people publicly laid down the law that AI must be used; any indication that it produces crap will be hidden.
And even if it _was_ related to AI, they would not admit it. First course of action is to blame user/programmer error and then QA process error. You shall not blame the golden calf. I am half serious and half not. But I do recommend reading the book "The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'" in conjunction with my hyperbole.
Sellers of Shopify are more like sellers on Amazon than they know. Shopify controls what you can sell, what apps you can use, so is it really software for your business or you’re just a cog in its machine to become the next Amazon. I’ve seen so many DTC brands switch to Medusa and Woocommerce with a custom storefront.
> Shopify controls what you can sell
In what ways? I'm sure there are businesses they refuse to support (like any company) but I have a family member running a Shopify store (selling things that you couldn't over Amazon due to logistics) and Shopify
- Doesn't have any pre approval process for products. We can add and edit products instantaneously with no process involving anyone else.
- Has never appeared to care, even when "products" are things like "we agreed on a delivery method over the phone".
I'd also point out that the store owns the brand with Shopify. We could switch out the backend for a different ones and the users wouldn't really notice. You couldn't do the same with Amazon.
Try selling used Apple products which you can on any website or marketplace online, except Apple will contact Shopify and they will unpublish products without even telling you.
You used to be able to install custom Shopify apps on your own store, now they make you jump through hoops. Their ideal situation is an Apple like walled garden where you can only install apps from their store. Had a friend trying to vibecode a custom Shopify app so he could replace one from the App Store that was running him $250/m. It was so confusing that he just gave up. I’m trying to get him to switch to an open-source alternative.
Try selling Vape products or adult products and you’ll see you don’t really control the software. Selling used Apple products, vapes, and adult products is completely legal. Yes Stripe and PayPal can stop you from accepting payments for those products. But why is my business software doing the same?
Shopify not being willing to fight battles to keep supporting stores that other people don't want them to isn't exactly the same as them choosing what you can sell... Though I guess I see some similarity.
> I’m trying to get him to switch to an open-source alternative.
Well if you want an argument in favor between terrible support, glitchy software, huge price hikes, and so on we aren't particularly happy with Shopify either...
> Shopify not being willing to fight battles to keep supporting stores that other people don't want them to isn't exactly the same as them choosing what you can sell...
It is the same.
Or rather the latter is inclusive of the former.
Exactly, Shopify as a business can do what it wants. But I will never let software manage my business that I don’t have control over.
Even if you have your own stack for software, you still need someone for payments, and that's where it hits you. Shopify was letting Kanye sells nazi merch, they don't give a crap for most things unless it's trademark issues.
> I will never let software manage my business that I don’t have control over.
I can't imagine this is actually possible in 2026 unless your business is a something like a cash-only lemonade stand.
Opensource is the only way to free sellers from propeitary SaaS and marketplace middlemen. I’m actually working on building an opensource Shopify for every vertical from restaurants to gyms to hotels.
How are you handling payments? Cash and crypto only?
There’s an adapter system and we have Stripe and PayPal adapters but some users have created one for Solana Pay and Coinbase. Essentially it’s up to the seller what payments they want to support. Create the adapter functions once and you’re good.
There are self-hosted options for almost everything (e.g. WooCommerce).
EXCEPT payments. (Unless you do crypto, which has been used for purchases by <2% of US adults.)
---
And the restrictions are not theoretical.
Most payment providers either outright prohibit (PayPal, CoinBase) or restrict (Stripe) legal gun transactions.
Hateful content is virtually universally banned by processors (see: Gab).
So... They're not choosing what you can sell. They're letting arbitrary third parties choose what you can sell? That seems worse.
Indeed it's worse, and apparently Valve/Steam is the only one who seems to care about something resembling freedom to sell legal things, even if we might subjectively disagree.
> But why is my business software doing the same?
Shopify runs a payment network called Shop Pay, and that network has relationships with the credit card companies like Visa. Honestly how do you expect to transact in goods that almost nobody will do business in? Even if you have the listing, what supported Shopify payment system will do the business?
Yes I know about Shop Pay (it’s a wrapper around Stripe). And just like Stripe and PayPal, Shop Pay gives Shopify the right to stop users from selling certain products.
I’m talking about connecting Shopify to authorize.net (credit card gateway) and a custom high risk processor. In that case, we are not using Shop Pay. But Shopify can still unpublish and restrict what you sell. That’s the issue. No one is saying Shopify has to allow sellers to sell high risk items under Shop Pay. It’s when you connect to a different payment processor.
>Try selling Vape products or adult products
Are these legal in the place they are selling? Or is it against shopify TOS to do so? These two I am not surprised.
>will unpublish products without even telling you.
Giving some benefits of doubt here first. May be someone could explain the rationale behind it. Because on the surface this seems wrong.
As long as you get a high risk payment processor, you can sell these products in the US. But even when you connect this high risk processor to Shopify, they can still stop you from selling certain products. Payment processors are supposed to handle that and if my payment processor is ok with it, who made Shopify the judge, jury, executioner? Why is a software that manages my product catalog and orders deciding what I can sell? If I'm selling something illegal, my payment processor will handle it or the wronged company can sue me. Shopify shouldn't be deciding this.
I mean take a look at how peptides are exploding. It's legal to sell them for research purposes, but you can't on Shopify. Unless you are on Plus and have an account manager and go thru backchannels. Literally Shopify picking winners instead of letting the market do it's job.
That is the assumption Shopify is just software, but it is not. It is a service. And I don't see why a service can't have a choice to choose which customer it wants to serve. Especially in a market with plenty of options.
I read some interesting drama involving YouTube style false copyright flagging at scale.
Don't ask me for details but I got the impression they got just involved enough to maximize harm.
It's not software but a platform which has both pros and cons.
"I’ve seen so many DTC brands switch to Medusa and Woocommerce with a custom storefront."
How many? A few dozen? lol
The answer is most likely none.
Sorry but as someone who has a Shopify store and also sells via Amazon - you are dead wrong.
I have much more freedom with Shopify, it's not even comparable. It's not even apples to oranges, it's apples to calculators.
Amazon places a lot more restrictions on everything, from products, product descriptions, images, it's quite difficult to list original products on Amazon (took me 2 weeks of work to register our product backlog when I started selling via Amazon, despite having GTINs and everything already in place). Cashflow etc is not comparable in ANY way.
Just wanted to call out a blatantly wrong comment.
Yep, as a former shopify seller, this read like someone who had no clue and no basis in reality. And yes i have a lot of criticisms of shopify, but for the most part on the product side you can do whatever you want if the payment platforms accept it, this is very different than amazon.
Depends on what you sell. We were in electronic recycling selling everything from Xeon processors and server ram to used iPhones and MacBooks on Amazon. Easy to sell and list, no issues.
Then we realized we weren’t really building a brand on Amazon so we started a Shopify store. Listed the same products and one day just unpublished. Messaged Shopify and they said we can’t sell used Apple products. Send them our Amazon and eBay stores with thousands of sales. Didn’t care. I brought in a payment processor myself, still unpublished. I just built my own Shopify alternative at that point.
In the end, you’re selling products that Shopify deems ok so you’re not going to face these issues. Do you really think Shopify doesn’t have issues just cause you don’t face them?
I am admittedly not an expert here but this does not at all sound like something that Apple can force Shopify to do. I was under the impression that when Apple does something like this it's primarily because the seller was positioning themselves as an official Apple reseller in some way which they do pretty aggressively police. Did Shopify give you any more details on why they believed they had to delist you?
The same thing happened with our other store.
Because we were in electronic recycling, many items came without batteries or chargers due to fire-risk concerns, so we had to source replacements ourselves. We eventually launched a private-label brand for generic camera batteries, drone batteries, power-tool batteries, chargers, and similar accessories.
Then Shopify unpublished those products too after Canon contacted them, claiming we were not allowed to sell them. But these were generic replacement products, the same kind of items sold by Anker and countless other electronics brands online.
If Canon believed we were doing something illegal, they could have sent a cease-and-desist and gone through the normal legal process. Instead, they went through Shopify’s back channels and effectively skirted due process, using platform pressure to remove products they simply did not want us selling.
But don’t worry, companies like Anker who have resources and pull can still sell them and have online websites. Again, the market is being manipulated and winners chosen.
Or were you doing something shady that was legitimate grounds for Shopify to remove those products? There's a big difference between what you personally think should be appropriate and what laws and compliance requirements consider. It's like the annual HN post about someone that claims Cloudflare shut down their account and eventually it turns out they were clearly doing something against the TOS.
Shopify doesnt block selling Nazi merchandise so idk what control you think they exercise
Nazi merchandise doesn’t have a corporation using back channels to get Shopify to unpublish products.
It's been a fun day for me today - my bank here in the UK suffered downtime which not only affected the app and online banking, but also online and possibly offline payments too.
I was glad when it finally came back on, after four hours off, so that I could order some material for a job... only to find that my supplier's site wasn't working. It's on shopify.
So too the two the other suppliers I use who offer the same thing I need, so I'm kinda stuffed as ordering from anytime now means I likely won't get my stuff in before the weekend, which is when I was planning on working with it.
Wonderful.
just take the day off mate, this shit happens in every field of work
eh, unfortunately it's not today's work that's impacted (beyond wasting some time), but this weekend's, which I thought I had wonderfully set up, taking advantage of time whilst my family's away.
Is there a long-term Shopify status graph? How common is this lately?
I ask because with the major AI push at Shopify lately, I would like to know if it is affecting stability.
I have a friend at shopify in a staff role and they are so incredibly into AI it's fascinating. Even their job interviews are all about using AI and the traditional algorithm questions are gone. PRs written by AI, and PRs reviewed by AI and rubber stamped by humans.
I can't speak to stability but I get the impression it's a poster child for being all in on AI, moreso than other tech companies. By far.
Tobi Lutke is known to be an eccentric. I listened to an interview a few years ago. Clearly smart and forward thinking. He's also polarizing. He's very into optimize everything, systems thinking. Hard to say it's wrong but definitely comes off a bit cold.
I don't like how Shopify deletes events from https://www.shopifystatus.com/ shortly after they are resolved. Outages have to be inferred by waking up to a bunch of alerts and hoping someone else posted about it on the internet.
I started scraping the Shopify status page every 5 minutes back in March of 2015 so I have more than 11 years of history.
This isn't the first outage and won't be the last but it's one of the most disruptive in recent memory.
You should publish that as a new page. It would be good to have that history.
X has always been a better source of outages than any official status site. It's either early, before there's anything official posted, or it's something the vendor doesn't consider worthy of an outage because it only affects a particular subset of customers.
Critically, it was the webhook/sync that was down which really messed with a lot of external systems (nosto, klaviyo, 3PLs...)
Total outage by the looks of it, all clients stores not accessible, isn't local.
my co's store is still up, but I don't know if anyone can order anything
Yeah let's consolidate further
Massive incident at Shopify since Jun 03, 2026 - 09:27 EDT.
All my sites are affected, I guess this is general.
Oh, that's funny. Just an hour ago I decided I'd make a Shopify app and see if there was any money to be made there. Now this.
So this is your fault.
Yup, and last week I brought down GitHub when I fell down and asked a friend to pull me up. At my weight, that was a bad pull request.
I really like the Ruby on Rails ecosystem and have deeply considered working at Shopify.
This has to be one of the hardest parts of working there. A bug takes down other peoples businesses.
Shopify was hiring in January, not sure what it's like now. I'd also love working on RoR projects, and have seriously enjoyed developing on Shopify.
I hated their CLI tool for app dev because I like tinkering myself, but I would've probably built the same thing in bash, so having a maintained CLI is nice.
Too bad I'm a medior, so there's a low chance they'd hire me ;P
There's also much more to Shopify than just Ruby feature work. I've heard tales of their infrastructure and it seems like it would be very exciting for the right kind of person.
Never worked there, probably never will, but they have my respect for the things I have seen, read and heard.
You’ll work with Ruby but the rails part is barely relevant at Shopify.
Rails was very relevant when I was at Shopify. There were some backend infra services in Go/Rust, Front end was largely React, and Data Science was Python. But all of the main website back ends were totally Ruby on Rails.
Our's are coming back slowly.
Direct link: https://www.shopifystatus.com/incidents/gbqcx5fk01gz
Is this bad?
@river fix it please.
https://x.com/tobi/status/2053121182044451016
This tweet should be a case study in anthropomorphizing AI. It has a name, a gender, a backstory. If you overheard this guy talking about his pet AI and missed the context that it's a machine, you'd think he was talking about a real human person. Very strange.
I wonder if River is a reference to the Firefly character, which was known for being unstable and unpredictable.
https://twitter.com/tobi/status/2053630840458944849
Apparently not
I wonder if this is related to the CEO's AI psychosis
What's the context on that?
have found Shopify's AI implementation to be sane and really useful ( building flows and surfacing documentation correctly ).
i assume they are referring to this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/douglaslaney/2025/04/09/selling...
"Employees must explain why AI can’t be used before asking for additional resources, like more staff or time. [...] Shopify is now factoring AI usage into performance reviews and peer evaluations."
I'd be tempted to believe it's more of an issue with their CTO
That's a pretty normal reaction to market forces. One of the few level-headed, down-to-earth CEOs.
Psychosis from AI is, by definition of psychosis, dysfunctional. Or are you saying he isn't suffering from AI psychosis?
Read his takes on twitter, he's far from level headed and down to earth, he has definitely drank the right-wing billionaires kool aid and turned full on MAGA in January 2025.
it works for us now
Is it premature to blame AI Slop?
Yes. We need statistics before that, not a single anecdote.
And even then we won't be able to tell if it's because of the AI or because they fired everybody that knows what they are doing.
> And even then we won't be able to tell if it's because of the AI or because they fired everybody that knows what they are doing.
This is an important distinction worth teasing apart when these events happen
No. As a Shopify User and app maintainer, I’ve started seeing more bugs and although Shopify is still much more reliable than Github, it’s the second time in 6 months I see it going down, something that would never happen 5 years ago.
Last month I found a critical bug in the forum where you could edit anyone’s post title.
> Is it premature to blame AI Slop?
You will never know. Lots of pretty important people publicly laid down the law that AI must be used; any indication that it produces crap will be hidden.
Nah, they used to go down like this before AI too.
The error message on some site was "Store not found", this is definitely a serious outage that we had not seen before.
If you're asking the question, most likely yes. If you have evidence of the problem being AI slop, no.
The scientific method is generally to ask a question, and test it, before randomly collected evidence makes the obvious undeniable.
And even if it _was_ related to AI, they would not admit it. First course of action is to blame user/programmer error and then QA process error. You shall not blame the golden calf. I am half serious and half not. But I do recommend reading the book "The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'" in conjunction with my hyperbole.
Remember: when AI succeeds, it's because AI is great. When AI fails, you're prompting it wrong.
Slopify